Articles Posted in Marketing Management

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Hype alert – Web 2.0 Marketing is a paradigm shift but only a portion of the market is using it today. In Part 1 I argued that market trends should be pushing you to use social networking, blogs, wikis, and the other tools of Web 2.0 in your marketing mix. Given the uneven adoption of these tools in your customer base you will be managing a mix of the old and new for quite some time. So think of it as expanding your paradigm.

Before we go on I want to add to what I said in Part 1. There is one additional reason for doing all this that is specific to the education market. Most teachers are isolated in their classrooms – they yearn to have their voice heard and to be part of a larger community. The asynchronous nature of most social media are ideal for meeting this need. It is one of the reasons there are so many education groups already on Ning.

So what does this “paradigm expansion kit” look like? Here are five ways of thinking like a Web 2.0 Marketer that you can add to your toolkit.

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Education marketers have been slow to adopt wikis, blogs, social networks, and virtual worlds. There are valid reasons for this (see below), but it is time for us as an industry to begin embracing these tools. In this series I’m going to explore the industry context, the gestalt, and some concrete ideas to help you get started down this path.

Over the past year I have been asking people “what is the first thing you do in Amazon after you make sure you have the product you were seeking?” The almost universal answer is that people scroll down to look at the user generated comments. This is the power of Web 2.0 at work – what your peers have to say on a subject is far more important than anything a company might say.

There are two primary reasons the education industry should be employing Web 2.0 tools:

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Busking teaches fundamental business concepts. As a young man I saw the world by tossing open my banjo case and belting out a few tunes. I played in Boston, Montreal, Tokyo, New York, Paris, San Francisco, Seville, New Orleans, and Amsterdam to name just a few spots.

Along the way I absorbed some interesting lessons that have helped me be more effective in the business world.

1 – Make people feel something. People respond to musicians who make an emotional investment in their performance. Laugh, sigh, get that ache in your voice, and share your joy.

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Information Overload is a serious problem in our culture today. People are frustrated and overwhelmed by the fire hose of information they are trying to absorb. But, as the American Philosopher Ann Landers was fond of saying:

“No one can take advantage of you without your permission.”In summary:618617_firemen_hose_practice

  • Personally we need to take control of our information diet. We need to discard our old paradigms and seek information only when we need it.
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Marketing and selling in the era of infinite input feels like howling into a gale. The average urban dweller is subject to 4,000 ads a day, 1 every 14 seconds. The only sane defense is to tune it all out, to turn it into wallpaper for your world.

Earlier in this series on Information Overload we looked at our broken paradigms of information management, a new personal productivity paradigm, and 10 ways to build instructional products for today’s learners. Today we look at what this means for those of us in the persuasive professions. The suggestions here are not just for education publishers – they are what I consider best practices for all marketers.

The fundamental problem is that the signal to noise ratio has gotten completely out of whack. I have an email account that I’ve been using for several years. Spammers have gotten their grubby little mitts on it and I now get over 3,000 spam emails a week at this address. I have great filtering – less than 100 make through so that isn’t the problem. The issue is that I no longer bother looking for false positives – I just delete it all and hope/pray that if it is important the person will find another way to reach me.

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KidArt_Metamorphosis_150.jpgSundance/Newbridge deserves kudos for their catalog cover contest. It embodies some of the elements of the Web 2.0 aesthetic in a traditional marketing vehicle and shows that you don’t have to reinvent the world to harness the power of user generated content.

I found this because the Austin American Statesman reported the winner in this morning’s paper (sorry no link on their site). If you think that won’t do much for them from a marketing standpoint you would be correct. Yes, it was very cool to see local 6th Grade Nicolette T. win for her work Metamorphosis and I hope local educators will think warmly of Sundance this fall.

But, the real impact is that over 400 other kids submitted entries and their schools were all paying attention to this. Those kids had fun (we assume), enaged their creative faculties, and got their competitive juices going. Sundance got some great ideas from their most important constituency, the kids who learn from their materials. Everyone gets to look at a cool cover for the next 6 months. It was a win all around.

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E-Mail Marketing to Educators: What`s Working was put on Heller QED on October 12th. I had the honor of speaking about eMail marketing in a web 2.0 world.

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My core message was that eMail 2.0 is activity driven, not demographics driven.

A person does something, and the company responds in a personal, authentic, and timely manner with a communication. It has the same give and take as a conversation. The focus is engaging people early in the decision making cycle with useful information, not at the end with a last ditch special offer.

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CowboyRoundup.jpgTeaching metaphors, the role of school in society, bad (i.e. wrong) press for video games, glitz vs. content, banned books, racism in games, phishing games, and monkeys at the keyboard. All featured on this weeks roundup!

Teachings of a Zen Gardener over at PickTheBrain is a beautiful analogy for what teachers do.

The always excellent Will Richardson posted “School as Node” over at Weblogg-Ed. The original post he references talked about revolution but Will argues that we need to engage in a conscious act of evolution. This is a nice follow on to the articles just published here by Paul Schumann.

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Can you build a target market for taco fine art photography? Bobby Henderson is trying it in an attempt to answer the question

“Is there a niche so small that it will fail because it’s so small?”

Think about this in the context of my article on selecting a target market. In the age of social media this is no longer a joke (ok – only a bit of one).

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